Headset Communications While Gaming

Are you using something like Teamspeak to control the chat? That is what we use for Star Citizen. What specific headset/mic are you using?

Before

Dell used to put IDT audio in most of its laptops. If you had one of those models, then on the Playback tab of the Sounds properties you would see Speakers and Headphones. If you were to right click on the Headphones, to open the context menu, you could make the headphones the default Communication device.

The result of doing that would be as you described: the headphones would carry the chat audio, and the laptop speakers would continue to play game sounds. In much older Dell laptops with IDT audio, the Communication Headphones were named "Independent (R.T.C.) Headphones".

When IDT went out of the consumer audio business, Dell switched to Realtek.  In most models with Realtek, if you open the Playback tab of the Sounds properties, you only have one listing that combines both speakers and headphones, with no option in the context menu to make the headphones into the communication device.

There might be some other way to do it, but I don't know how.

If you install the Windows native audio driver in place of the Realtek driver, you might get back the option, but it depends on which version of native driver. In this screen shot from a Latitude with Windows 7, "Speakers" is listed twice, with the 2nd one actually being the headphones jack of the dock that the laptop is on.

The problem with using the Windows native driver is that, in most Windows operating systems, the mic jack won't work with it, although Microsoft might have fixed that in Windows 10. I haven't been able to find out for sure.